Tag: comic books

Not only am I sick now, but so is the entire rest of my family, so there won’t be too much cooking going on for a bit. So I guess I will continue to regale you with tales of my trip to New Jersey since that was, if not an exotic location, definitely a fun one.

At a friend’s suggestion, I drove out to Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank. For those not in the know, it’s a comic book store owned by Kevin Smith, who is the writer/director/actor of the View View Askewniverse movies (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, etc.) — among many other things. Honestly, it’s just a comic book store, which is something I am eminently familiar with back home; after all, I worked in one for a while back in high school. My main reason for visiting this particular store was a) the owner, and b) the movie ephemera from Smith’s movies that are displayed in glass cases on site. You see, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was the movie that my husband and I watched on our first date, so I kind of had to go check out the Secret Stash.

Of course, I had to get a selfie with Buddy Christ from Dogma. I don’t usually take selfies, but I made a special exception here.

On my way out of the shop, I discovered that it is also a Pokéstop in PokémonGo, to my complete and utter lack of surprise — most comic book stores and geek-related places are.

On my walk back to my car, I stumbled upon YESTERcades of Red Bank; with all of its windows open on that warm day, the sounds of the vintage video games drew me in. I discovered that instead of paying by the game, there you pay a flat hourly fee or buy a day pass, and you can play as many times as you want. At $8.75 per hour or $25 per day, that’s a lot less than I would have paid when I went to the arcade as a kid… What can I say, I like video games, but I die a lot. Honestly, if they had one of these in town, I know where I’d be taking my kids for their next birthdays!

They had a wall of pinball games, more modern games with flat screens and couches, as well as a party room in the back.

I’m pretty sure I recognized 95% of the games there and have played 75% of them at least once. My fave find was their TRON cabinet, since it’s definitely the most meta video game I know of.

I kind of want to show the pictures of the costumes that I made after the pro photos come in, so that it’s possible to see what they’re supposed to look like before I get into the pictures where my kids aren’t goofing off. (Not that I mind the goofing off, but it does make it difficult to see what’s going on with the costumes.) But there were some other great costumes that we saw on Friday that my kids didn’t pose with.

My kids have no idea who this comic book version of The Wasp is, although I’m guessing many people these days at least have an inkling since the Ant Man and The Wasp trailers have hit. I was very impressed by the fact that although there had to be a lot of structure under the suit to secure the wings, her outfit was smooth and nearly seamless. This is a trick that’s difficult to pull off in real life.

This Gordon Freeman with a headcrab asking about the release of Half Life 3 made me laugh — especially since the headcrab has its own tiny coffee mug.

This tiny little Mega Man couldn’t have been more than four years old, and even so he had full-on armour and a blaster that lit up.

I believe that this was an original steampunk character. I was most impressed with her insanely complicated wig, and her gun that she’d made from scratch out of paper/cardboard!

This daring outfit is Ryuko Matoi’s battle costume from the anime Kill la Kill. Given how much skin is showing, it presents a lot of logistical challenges (and probably uses a lot of body glue).

This Harry Dresden from Jim Butcher’s novel series The Dresden Files was obviously based on the cover art, since he’s wearing a fedora (it’s an in-joke with fans that Harry never wears hats and actually rather dislikes them, but the publishers chose to add a fedora to the character on the covers as a kind of shorthand for a detective). I liked that his wizard’s staff and that Bob the Skull‘s eyes lit up.

I reached a personal milestone last night: not only did I successfully use my serger, but I worked with stretch fabric and I didn’t mess up! I mean, it’s not perfect, but it works. It’s hard to describe the sense of quiet triumph that is running through me at the moment.

(Okay, well, I did put in a sleeve of Thing 1’s bodysuit inside-out, but that had nothing to do with either the serger or the type of fabric. Honestly, I can’t count how many times I’ve done that just with plain old cotton. It’s kind of embarrassing.)

A friend of mine has the same serger herself, and she was insistent that I use mine for its intended purposes instead of letting it sit and gather dust. She even threaded it for me, which honestly was the part that I found the most intimidating. (Well, that and the cutting blade.) My mom bought me this serger last year and I had such big plans for it, but I kept letting the complexity of the machine overawe me. Now I have dreams of simple circle skirts once ComicCon is over and done with…

Tonight I’m off to another friend’s birthday celebration, and I think it’s safe for me to write about his gift since so far as I can tell he doesn’t read my blog. At least, he seemed genuinely surprised when I asked him if he’d like a pie for his birthday and, if so, what kind is his favourite. He did say that fruit pies, especially strawberry-raspberry-blueberry or strawberry-rhubarb were his top-ranked. However, rhubarb is almost impossible to get this time of year (although knowing this now, I’ll freeze some in advance next year when it comes in season). And red fruits just didn’t seem dark enough for what I had in mind.

You see, my friend is a huge Batman fan, and I wanted to make him something appropriate to his fandom. After all, as LEGO Batman says, Batman “only works in black, and sometimes very, very dark grey” — although I’d go so far as to say that Adam West’s cowl was a deep purple or blue, depending on the lighting. Since I didn’t want to add food colouring to the filling, so I went with blackberry-blueberry. As usual, I used the Purity Pastry recipe from page 73 of The All-New Purity Cook Book (Elizabeth Driver, 2001). As my father and his mother before him taught me, I made the crust using lard instead of vegetable shortening, which I’ve always been told makes the crust flakier. The filling was 3 1/2 cups of blackberries, 2 1/2 cups of blueberries, 1 cup of sugar, 3 Tbsp corn starch, and 1 1/2 Tbsp lemon juice.

At first I thought I might make the top crust with a large cutout so that it looked like the Bat Signal, but a friend had linked to a recipe for Rustic Cast Iron Skillet Peach Pie on social media, and I really liked how they’d made their top crust. I thought that cookie-cutter cutouts would look a bit like a cloud of bats against a night sky, which is an image used repeatedly in Batman media. Of course, the fruit filling isn’t totally flat and the bats warped a bit during baking, so they look their most bat-like from directly above. It’s a really simple technique and can be achieved using any shape of cookie cutter, although I have a feeling that the simpler the shape, the more recognizable it will be when cooked. I do have a feeling that I’ll be using this technique in the future to customize my pies. If you don’t like making crust from scratch, I see no reason why it wouldn’t work equally well with store-bought dough.

Day 3 of Ottawa ComicCon (Sunday) I went as a femme version of the Joker from Batman. This was my easiest costume of the weekend, since I assembled the pieces instead of making them. I bought the ugly purple ladies’ suit years ago at Value Village for about $10; I’m pretty sure it was originally a mother-of-the-bride dress from the 1980’s. It was too small for me at the time, but the outfit just screamed “Joker” to me, and I hoped that one day I’d fit into it. (Now it’s actually a little bit big.) I bought the wig at Audrey’s Costume Castle and it was the last one of its kind that they had in stock, so I don’t know the make or model. The striped hose were from an American Mcgee’s Alice costume I’d done years before, and the shoes were just ones I’d had in the closet. The bow and flower were all from Michaels. I thought final look would be more Jack Nicholson’s Joker than anything else, but in the end I think I looked more like the 1960’s Cesar Romero Joker. At any rate, I don’t think anyone was confused as to who I was supposed to be.